Saturday, December 01, 2012

Today I thought it might be nice to have a small talk about Digital Asset Management systems (DAMs). Now I have to admit, given the abundance of open-source DAM systems and my general lack of having actually tried them, might make me not really qualified to talk about this. However I think those are actually really useful if you are managing a game project with more than one artist, and I just happened to stumble on one (TACTIC) that seems to be especially geared towards 3D movie and game development (Note: I hope this doesn't turn into too much of an advertisement post, but this system is after all completely open-source. But if you have other, or better DAMs for FOSS game development, feel free to add them in the comments).

So what are DAMs actually? Maybe this short introduction video of the system mentioned above, will give you an idea quickly:

The system was quite recently open-sourced under the Eclipse Public License, and has been previously in use by some of the big 3D gaming companies. For an overview of the features head here. Its client interface is completely web-based, and you can easily set up your own asset-repository VM server if you want.

For most FOSS games (which tend to be mostly one-man shows :( ) such a system is probably overkill, but using a DAM might actually help involving more people and make collaboration across the globe more efficient (Just like GIT and such systems did for code collaboration projects).

Maybe someone would also be willing to host such a service for FOSS game projects? However high data-transfers rates would make it probably not possible to offer such a service for free. Feel free to comment on that too ;)